Deliveroo ad implying delivery anywhere (even space) is banned in UK

LONDON — A cyclist pedals furiously in space with only one mission: delivering sushi to a hungry astronaut. A man gets a pizza in a field after seemingly tunneling underground to escape from prison, and a woman receives a delivery during a car chase.

Through the unusual series of deliveries, a voice-over says: “Order what you want, where you want, when you want it,” with text at the bottom of the screen warning that “some restrictions apply, obviously...”

But regulators in Britain found the fundamental message of the advertisements for Deliveroo, the London food delivery service, misleading, because the service is not available throughout the country.

“The ad must not appear again,” the regulator, the Advertising Standards Authority, said last week. It said the commercial had drawn 22 complaints from viewers who said that Deliveroo did not operate in their area.

A spokeswoman for Deliveroo suggested that the ad, which first aired on television in February, was not to be taken literally.

“We know some people will be disappointed to hear that Deliveroo can’t yet deliver to outer space and is still to reach some parts of the U.K.,” the spokeswoman, Emily Kraftman, the company’s director of marketing for Britain and Ireland, said in a statement.

She said that the company had intended for “a playful and humorous” commercial to show that deliveries were possible in “a wide range of places for a range of occasions,” including a home, an office, the park or a friend’s house. Deliveroo is available in about 200 towns and cities in Britain, and is expanding rapidly across the country.

The company tried to make sure the ad was not misleading, Kraftman said. It worked with Clearcast, a nongovernmental organization that operates the clearance...